Events can be useful for focusing attention, but also quick repositioning. We did three major things this last year: one was the Roberto Saviano public lecture, which I've written about previously but it remains one of the strongest things we've done so far.

We'll look to do a similarly big, similarly open event again. Saviano was also a big team-building exercise, involving many bits of Fabrica pulling together at the same time, as well as ensuring that Fabrica was aligned to progressive elements within Italy. Roberto Saviano was incredibly generous with his time and attention during his visit, and we're delighted that he said that he thought Fabrica could be "part of a renaissance of ideas within Italy." I'd like that very much.

Huge thanks to Enrico Bossan, the lead of our "Slow Journalism" studio, who spent months organising this with Saviano and Feltrinelli, his publishers, and also to Angela Quintavalle, for her sterling efforts on the event too.

The second major event was Sam Baron's studio at Salone del Mobile in Milano, which is one of the design industry's major events—perhaps still the major one. I previously talked about the exhibition, but I also want to mention a less well-covered, invitation-only event that Sam, Marta and team put together, to great acclaim from those who experienced it.

Enrico Bossan led the project from our side, curating and producing the work of young Iranian photographers. It says much about Enrico that, despite his many years in photojournalism, he can still find new ways to create work. In this case, he pointed out to me that Fabrica need not always pull young researchers to Fabrica—sometimes we can go to where they are, and act as a platform for their work. Particularly if it is difficult for them to move, as is the case sometimes in Iran. Enrico's indefatigable spirit, in returning to such a complex situation years after he first tried to produce work there, and his customary passion about the project, was an inspiration that drove us all forwards.

It also moves on aesthetically and intellectually from much previous Fabrica photojournalism, and is a quieter, more subtle, almost humble project—and it is all the more powerful for that (as indicated in the unprecedented reaction to it.) Again, it's more sophisticated in media terms, as it is Fabrica in a diffferent kind of "enabling mode". Thus it builds capacity in Iran, rather than the privileged West.

It was also Fabrica's first self-published book, and so was a steep learning curve for all involved. We're actively focusing on this business aspect of the work. I see sustaining such work through innovation in format or business model to be a creative act in itself, freeing creators from the sometimes stifling structural relationships they often work within. We're not there yet, of course—we still did not quite cover the costs of doing this project—but it is a huge step forward, and gives us experience and confidence that we will take into every publishing project from now on.

This show took place on Necchi's tennis court, and comprised objets designed by Sam's studio, each speaking of a particular FAI property in Italy. Each researcher was sent to a different historical property, across Italy, and had two days to understand the place, talk with locals, design an object which conjured the place, and make it, using local craft skills or artisans, and with no budget! Given that test, it's somewhat amazing that the objects that emerged from this brief are so lovely, considered and evocative. As with a Fabrica dinner on a Milano tram I will mention shortly—also organised by Sam's studio—the thoughtful reflection and delicate craft was often seen as welcome relief after the "shouting about chairs" of Salone elsewhere.

Although there were other fine exhibitions (such as Drawing Glass in Paris and From The Floor Up in London, also by Sam's studio, as well as a major Colors exhibition at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas in Sydney)—and Aaron Siegel's studio is working on a major show for Rome at the moment—the other one I'll pick out is for theLisbon Architecture Triennale, a few weeks ago. Again, Sam's studio took the lead here, though working with David Penuela from Aaron's team.

Well, almost one year in. Although I started formally at the beginning of November, I was well into planning and prep by this time a year ago. So now seems as good a time as any to review progress and post a series of reflections about work thus far.

This is the first in a series of posts running this week, reviewing some of the changes made, and the projects produced.

But these restructures are the big obvious, if challenging, changes. I think the real work happens in all the small- and medium-sized changes in the cracks between those things. My favourite management quote is from Peter Drucker, doyen of such things:

"Culture eats strategy for breakfast."

Indeed. And although creating the appropriate structures and processes helps, it's the small things that create culture. The habits.

After a first six months of hard work, it was clear we were taking Fabrica forward into a new stage. But around June-July, some kind of threshold was reached, and a new momentum had been generated. It's funny how the work builds and releases like that. It's imperceptible at the time, but suddenly discernible as soon as you're over the threshold.

And then August, which is a holiday for Fabrica (as it still is in much of Italy.) So it seemed the right time to reflect on the previous 11 months of work. I produced a poster covering those months prior to August 2013 (I started in November 2012, so it's not all under my leadership.) This was a kind of "thank you" to the team, and a summary of where we are. And yes, a poster as thank you is what happens when the boss is a designer, which is hardly efficient—but then there is more to life than efficiency.

Here it is (with a couple of secret events blurred out.) There is a lot there, and I'm really happy with much of it. But better, there's a lot more to come, and I'm incredibly excited about where we go next.

This was going to be a post about our new Fabrica publication, "Iranian Living Room", and in a way it still is.

"Iranian Living Room" is a new photojournalism project we've produced and self-published. Enrico Bossan, our brilliant head of photography, sought out 15 young Iranian photographers to take pictures of "interior life" in Iran (mainly Tehran.) We wanted to coincide with the Iranian election as we knew much of the associated imagery would be CNN and BBC cameras on the streets. But we also knew that the real discussions amongst Iranians would take place in private, off the streets, in the relative freedom of the "living room", away from the prying eyes of the world's media, and the state.

The results were wonderful, and a credit to the photographers, and to Enrico and his team, Fabrica designer An Nam Young, and coordinator Farhad Babaei. For Fabrica, in this case, it was interesting to work as a platform for the photography of others, as curator, facilitator, producer. The book is a fine physical object too, on great paper, with embossed gold cover, exposed spine binding whose colours evoke the carpets pictured throughout, and it lies open flat just like Robin says it should.

It's a lovely, lovely book, with texts by Enrico and Hamid Ziarati; more details here. (La Repubblica were kind enough to do a spread of photos from it in their "D" magazine on Saturday.)

We wanted to design, produce and publish the book ourselves, using the internet to distribute rather than the traditional route of labouring under the often antiquated conditions of publishers and retailers. It's the first time that Fabrica has self-published a major book, so a big step forward. So we dutifully created the Fabrica shop using Shopify, and plugged in our PayPal and credit card accounts, just as we do with Colors magazine.

There the fun started. We couldn't place orders and could't figure out why (the error was a non-specific error code, with no explanation.) After calls and emails to Shopify and PayPal (the PayPal office in Dublin, actually; hello tax evasion!) it turned out PayPal was the problem.

I was told that their shopping cart code was blocking the order because the book had the word "Iranian" in the title. And that word is on a "blacklist" (their word, not mine) as PayPal is based in the USA. And that was that. Our PayPal account manager on the phone in Dublin—who was vaguely helpful and evasive in equal measure—said that he could tell by my accent that I was American and I would understand the issue.

Leaving aside the fact that I am in fact English, and generally sound like it, I find the broader point extraordinary in so many ways I barely know where to start.

PayPal are currently looking into whether they can hard code our book's title into a "white list" (again, their words) of phrases that their filters will not block. (This is not exactly the solution I had in mind.) In the meantime, they suggested we change the name of the book in our shopping cart.

Leaving aside the fact that of course we don't want to change the name of our book in the shopping cart, I find this politically-motivated censorship, willingly if not actively carried out by a corporation, absolutely despicable. I have no idea if the US government actually enforces this on PayPal; the PayPal representative could not confirm or deny.

If a person judged a book not even by its cover, but by its title—or rather, by one word in its title—and judged it to the extent that they actively tried to restrict its distribution, without examining the actual book for a nanosecond, you would think them a moron at worst, if not a moron with worryingly totalitarian instincts.

You can of course say that we don't have to deploy PayPal as a component of our business—that we are free to choose—but as we know a) free markets do not tend to generate much choice, and b) if PayPal had made clear this kind of thing was likely to happen I would have run a mile. When you look at their homepage, "censorship" does not exactly leap out at you as one of their core brand values, although perhaps it should. It's a company's, or a state's, choice as regards their position on such things, but one must at least make it clear.

When the error occurred, of course they do not have the guts to state that the error code is generated because "Iranian" is on a list of banned words and accordingly you cannot put a product with that word in it in your shopping cart. (Perhaps PayPal would prefer that the title was "Living Rooms in the Axis of Evil" or "Living Rooms of People Not Like Us" or "If You Like These Living Rooms So Much Why Don't You Go And Live There?")

One of the implicit ideas behind the "Iranian Living Room" project was to indicate how everyday life in Iran is not so different to ours in "the West"; how people in the comfort of their own homes also slouch in front of the TV, act up in front of a mirror, argue, smoke, play around, eat together, dress differently, gossip, play with their pets, how men and women live together and apart in the same space, and so on. How everyday life is not so alien; how people are not always living under a restrictive political regime monitoring and controlling all of their communications.

Oh, the irony.

You can currently buy "Living Room" from the Fabrica shop. Please do. It's a wonderful book, and is in fact called "Iranian Living Room". (Have I made that clear? The book is about Iran, people: enter at your own risk!) The proceeds cover the cost of doing the project, no more. I hope to be able to report back that it will be correctly titled in shopping cart at some point too. And as soon as we set up the ability for you to buy it via your credit card direct—in a few days—we will be removing PayPal from the Fabrica and Colors stores. If you use PayPal, I encourage you to do the same. (I would hold back our book appearing in the store until this happened, but thanks to the project's publication in La Repubblica and elsewhere, we have to make the book available now.)

Hopefully I'll be able to post about the project itself soon.

(Thanks also to Fabrica's Aaron, Federico, Giulia and Paola for gamely trying to fix this mess for the last two days.)

Update one:The PayPal account manager emailed to say: "Your account has been added to the whitelist and will no longer see that error message." Right. So the book has the correct title in the store once again, but this does not, of course, lay a finger on the bigger issue.

Update two:When I firmly pointed out to the PayPal account manager that this wasn't good enough, I got this copy-pasted chunk of text in return (I could see it was copy-pasted as it was a different font to the rest of the message. Always a giveaway, that.)

"Hi Dan,

As a global company, PayPal has a presence in multiple jurisdictions requiring it and its subsidiaries to abide by sanctions regulations. These regulations are imposed by governmental regulatory bodies, including the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), the Luxembourg Commission de Surveillance du Secteur Financier (CSSF), the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) and Japan Ministry of Finance (MOF), among others.

PayPal’s compliance with the sanctions regulations include screening to detect account holders and transactions that are not supported by the PayPal system for regulatory reasons. This includes screening for transactions which are for the benefit of ?sanctioned entities? (i.e. entities which are searched on international lists to prevent financing of terrorism and money laundering) and screening against other internationally binding rules affecting local and cross border trade, as the case may be.

As previously announced in May 2012 (https://www.x.com/node/309468), we have introduced API error 13122 (Transaction violates PayPal User Agreement). In the next release, currently scheduled for Feb 20, PayPal will expand the scanning of transactions and various PayPal account attributes. Any payment initiated where a potential match is found may be immediately declined with error code 13122 at the attempt of payment, and the payer will not be able to pay with PayPal in this instance.

Thanks"

It's worth noting that the above link to x.com does not work.

Update three:I've received an email from PayPal management apologising profusely. I'll update again shortly with more details.

PayPal have issued statements to all and sundry in the media stating that it was a temporary mistake, a mere oversight, which they rectified quickly.

I still struggle with many aspects of this, however.

Firstly, it took a lot of effort on our part to get PayPal to pay attention to the issue. It took three or four of our staff calling almost constantly to get PayPal Dublin to deal with our issues. It took me, as CEO, personally intervening. In terms of "adding it to the whitelist", I had to suggest that the account manager walk across the floor to ask the engineer directly whether it was possible (I was being told they didn't know whether it was possible; I asked whether the engineer was in Dublin or California, and on being told "Dublin", I suggested it would be a simple thing to find out.) Yes, PayPal might do 7.5m transactions a day, as was pointed out to me, but they're on a handful of codebases and this is a line of code, which would take minutes to commit.

Secondly, upon complaining about the issue, I was sent what the PayPal management later described as the "boilerplate" text above. Had I not written this blog entry and used social media (and had a long-running blog and active social media profile—not exactly Beyoncé, but y'know) would there really have been an apology forthcoming?

I do believe the manager at "PayPal Global Initiatives" is sincere when he says "this sort of thing makes me sick to my stomach." He seems, in email, a nice guy and is trying to help. But he also says "we could have handled this better and we could have turned you back on faster without you having to resort to social media to get our attention."

I suspect I had to resort to social media to get their attention. Had this blog entry not been subsequently picked up by everyone from BBC Persian to GigaOm, from Dezeen to Fast Company, would, in the manager's words, our "case (have) gotten the attention of the leadership at PayPal (who are) making changes to make sure this doesn't happen to anyone else"? If it had been someone stepping into the internet for almost the first time and setting up their first online shop, would they have known how to bring it to their attention, and thus got the issue solved? Known to push when told it might be difficult to change some code? Or would they have stopped and tried something else, when that first call to PayPal proved problematic, obscure, troubling; possibly concluding it was their fault not PayPal's? We know (roughly) how this business works, and we pushed, and as a result of this complete accident, we're glad that we brought an issue to some of the world's attention, and got PayPal to fix it pretty quickly.

But I do wonder what would've happened had we not been persistent with our phone calls, or we had changed the name of the book, as suggested, or not taken to the internet to amplify the issue.

Thirdly, and I think most importantly, I still cannot get a real clarification on "the error" that they are apologising for. They apologise for applying the blacklist to our book. But does this mean that the blacklist should not apply to all books, or all 'cultural products', or what? Or that it should not apply as we are in Italy, and not under US jurisdiction? And what is the blacklist applied to? And what else is on the blacklist?

(I have half a mind to commission a new Fabrica project: an installation with three screens: one, to the left, generating fake product names; the middle, illustrating attempts to push said faux-products through transactions with PayPal, indicating real-time success or failure, and third to the right tracing the outline of the emerging blacklist. Is "Persian soap" OK? How about "Australian weapons grade uranium"? "Iraqi cheese"? "French pot"? When you bump into what Rory Hyde called "PayPal's blunt geopolitical cyberwall" it feels a bit like the old Indian legend about the blind men feeling the shape of an elephant ...)

The opacity of the operation is the most worrying aspect, for me. As I said above, it is an individual's, a company's, or a state's, right to choose what to filter. We all do. I am a grown-up, and understand something of the world we live in and work in as a commercial entity. As long as I know who I'm working with, what their position is, and what they're interesting in moving towards, I can judge whether I'm happy to work with them.

But I would like to think that a corporation, particularly originating in the "land of the free", would benefit from being honest, open and relatively transparent about their business operations. Perhaps it would even be an advantage to be seen to be doing so in the current climate. That would appear to be wishful thinking as regards PayPal—I simply cannot see them doing it any time soon, but I would love to be proved wrong. The number of US citizens expressing outrage about this on my Twitter stream was something to behold. Most had no idea that there were filters deployed in this way, books or not.

This opacity allied to the sheer bluntness of their code is troubling. The most banal of filters was applied:

If (word) equals "Iranian" then fail.

It's utterly elementary stuff. Again, how many other titles have previously been inadvertently blocked through this? And against what search terms? That code barely qualifies as an algorithm. This is not exactly writing software we cannot read.

At a deeper level, it indicates a startling misunderstanding of the cultural power of code. In stark if mundane terms, It illustrates how software is actually shifting culture, in this case, presumably inadvertently. Their lazy coding prevented what I think is a good book coming into the world. It reveals a fundamental lack of care for the potency of their algorithms.

Clearly, our little episode is no PRISM, and no Flash Crash — at face value, it is nothing. It is over already. Yet its own small way, it is somehow another indication of how network culture, as nebulous a concept as that is, can directly or indirectly affect our lives.

In a sense, you can read it as a storm in a teacup, or a teacup in a storm. (Either way, it's a teacup.) But this non-episode either describes an errant line of code, fixed within a couple of days ... or it is another indication of how algorithms are shaping the way we now live, work and play. Were such error to be applied in the context of a smart city, as opposed to 'merely' 7.5m financial transactions per day, you can see why I and others are talking in terms of starting with smart citizens instead.

In these case, code can be used to create immense cultural possibilities (or, at our really basic level, we can use new infrastructure to self-publish a book of photojournalism.) Or it can be used to destroy them, curtail them, inhibit them. A software company, embroiled in radical disruption as PayPal is, should do better. It should take more care.

Sadly, only a few non-coders understand the cultural power of code; equally, it would seem only a few coders understand the cultural power of code.

Since I've been at Fabrica, one simple thing we've done is to increase the frequency of the lectures and workshops we host here. Fabrica had a long tradition of inviting people to come and talk, or run workshops—in the distant past we had everyone from Tomato to Issey Miyake, Ferran Adrià to Michael Nyman (sadly little of this era was captured on film, as far as I can see, though I have found piles of unmarked betamax in the basement. If anyone wants to come and volunteer to go through that please get in touch!) We're centrally placed in Europe—30 minutes from Venice—and so it's relatively easy logistically, and emotionally, to pull people here.

In recent years, Fabrica had been running one lecture per month, roughly, and three or so workshops per year. I wondered if we could do one lecture per week, or every couple of weeks. We've been doing that, and I'm happy to say that this week we've started sharing this recent batch. ("Teaser" above.)

Of course the recent years' lectures were also filmed, and put online, although we had a quick discussion (thanks Ries Straver, Alessandro Favaron and team) about changing the way we present them—sharing more effectively via Vimeo (and then our next website too); shooting with two cameras but with very simple edits, cutting between the presenter and their slides, as per current idioms (as opposed to the previous split-screen); introducing the DOG; ramping the pace up (we make clean, jump cuts, straight into the lecture, where possible); credits are placed on Vimeo rather than in the video itself; fin is simply URL on black. Super stripped-back, super-simple, all about the lecture itself. All of this to make it easier to edit, actually (we had a long backlog of videos waiting to be edited when I arrived. Previous talks are also there, but the quality of the video is a little variable—though there are some great things there too: Sterling, Slavin, Heller, Troika ...)

The talks are long enough to let the speaker stretch out a bit, unlike some other popular online lectures which attempt to boil down complex work into 15 minute formats. (In fact, my aspiration for Fabrica Lectures would be: "Like TED but good".)

We usually follow with a Q&A with our researchers, but we cut that from the video as it's usually a little more informal—which is a nice change of pace for us, but difficult to convey for you. Besides, it keeps the talk simple and self-contained. We usually see the speaker mobbed by Fabricanti too, over drinks afterwards, but we don't like to show that.

We have more talks to follow, and will be posting at the rate of one per week. Having used the initial set to pull some necessary focus on interaction, tech, code and urbanism a fair bit (though far from exclusively) it's time to broaden our wings a bit now. They're curated by Fabrica—anyone here can make a suggestion, and we discuss together.

Again, the lectures are primarily for the benefit of our researchers and collaborators—but as we are also interested in the act of documenting, sharing the conversations we have here, and building connections, we are happy to share them with you too. Enjoy.

Malcolm McCullough is one the key thinkers and writers about the intersection of the network, digital media, and the urban and architectural—hence his work being of particular interest here. So I was delighted to oblige when he asked me to provide a testimonial for the back of his latest book, "Ambient Commons; Attention in the age of embodied interaction".

I've included the longer version of that testimonial below, in lieu of a more formal review, followed by a series of key passages I noted upon reading the book. These are not the only interesting bits, I hasten to add—the whole book is worth reading, and as a whole. Still, these are annotations I made at the time, in Sterling Format.

McCullough's insights into high and low resolution, focus, attention, immanent data, context suggesting intent, and the nature of the ambient, are hugely useful. I can't recommend the book highly enough to those interested in what the present and future of the contemporary urban landscape might look like when refracted through a rich understanding of the past. Despite being the "wake up call" I describe below, it's also a very peaceful book, a learned book that's a good read, a poetic book which has a pleasurable calm about it.

In doing so, like Rory Hyde's recent book, it actually sketches out a relevant role for architects in future, which is something you won't find in mainstream architectural discourse. So architects might want to read it just as much as interaction designers.

Full testimonialAmbient Commons is both a timely, if highly civilised, wake-up call and a hugely valuable guidebook to the new post-"digital" landscape of contemporary urban culture.

In suggesting we "take back our attention", genuinely consider our surroundings, take notice of the world, McCullough argues for a radical rebalancing of our patterns of living, working, playing - not as a refusenik, but as engaged and critical designer and thinker, and backed up by building on a bravura free-wheeling whistle-stop tour through an "environmental history of urban information".

As physical and digital entwine such that they can rarely be separated, the relationship between disciplines and perspectives becomes increasingly complex and interwoven too. "Ambient Commons" demonstrates how a book can strategically expand the perspective, toolkit and practical vocabulary of the designers, coders and architects who are helping produce the new soft city, but through its open, diverse and richly patterned reference points and positions, it will be engaging and insightful for anyone who wants to understand what's going on on the street of today and tomorrow.

McCullough also demonstrates how important it is that we understand technology as culture, and that it is worthy of philosophical inquiry. He manages to convey these complex ideas such that they feel accessible, yet are rigorously researched, are instantly appealing, yet prompt considered reflection, stoking the engines on many trains of thought.

It is also, unlike most texts that pivot around technology, beautifully written. It is a critical book to have written at this point.

Some choice excerpts"Whether carried about in your bag, hung on walls, or built into everyday objects, media feeds seem to be everywhere, as if people would suffer without them. Unlike the soot and din of a bygone industrial age, many of these feeds have been placed deliberately, and many of them appeal to the senses."(((Inadvertently plays to my notion of "new smokestacks".)))

"The interface arts have become the most prominent arts, especially since technology has spread beyond the desktop, work has left the office, and social play has networked at street level."(((Well said, and still little understood in design culture.)))

"Remembering can occur one detail at a time. A patch of sun slowly crossing a wall might produce a sense of calm while you work. It might remind you how not all that informs has been encoded and sent. Its higher resolution and lower visual demands can restore your attention in a world that is otherwise too often low resolution and insistent."

"Altogether, advertising stops at nothing. As a cultural force, it has few equals. And as environmental experience, it often leaves you little choice but to tune out the world."

"As explained in Lisa Reichelt’s Twitter-friendly coinage of “ambient intimacy,” social media use countless trivial messages to build a detailed portrait, even an imagined presence, of a friend. At least to some degree, this restores a lost kind of awareness found in traditional life. The upstairs shutters are opened, the bicycle is gone from its usual spot at the usual time, deliveries are being made, and the neighbors are gossiping. To their enthusiasts, social media re-create some of this environmental sense, albeit across the necessary distances and at the accelerated paces of the metropolis."

"(T)he role of technology shifts as well, away from a means to overcome the world toward a means to understand it."

"Until recently, interaction designers have focused more on how users apply technology in the foreground of attention, as a deliberative task, for an intended purpose—and less on the role of context, or the importance of tacit knowledge, and how these

"Like the German Umwelt (literally, “surrounding world”), milieu and ambiance also implied an environmental influence on outlook or action."

"Spitzer connected this modern sociological notion back to ancient Greek and Roman cosmologies in which mortals did not merely occupy their environment, but indeed were embraced by it. “For the Latin verb ambire had not only the literal meaning of the Greek verb περιέχειυ; it possessed as well the same connotation of protection, of a warm embrace: cf. [Pliny]: “domis ambiri vitium palmitibus ac sequacibus loris,” Although competing versions and translations of Pliny the Elder exist, one reading is this, “a country house embraced in the shoots of closely reined straps of grapevine.” Except now make that carefully switched runs of fiber-optic cables. Today, that embrace is by information."

"The world has been filling with many new kinds of ambient interfaces. Nothing may be designed on the assumption that it will be noticed. Many more things must be designed and used with the ambient in mind. Under these circumstances, you might want to rethink attention."

(With respect to cars: )"How long will it take to recognize the consequences of much wider overreliance on smart devices?"(((Yes. I've noted this before—in the middle of the smart citizens piece—but driverless cars are a complete dead-end ('scuse the pun.) Outsourcing decision-making to code is not a good idea in this context. "Shared space" systems, which require heightened engagement from drivers, are safer; traffic lights, machines to which decision-making is outsourced, are less safe. Let's learn from that.)))

“Is there anywhere on earth exempt from these swarms of new books?” asked Erasmus, the first modern editor, in the sixteenth century."

"Floridi has advanced a more carefully qualified definition of information: “true semantic content.” With certain exceptions (such as sunrises), being informed generally involves linguistically encoded meanings, at appropriate levels of abstraction, all made intelligible by frames of knowledge. Without these, transmissions that are meaningless or false may too easily be taken for information."

"Floridi calls nonsemantic information like animal tracks or sunrises “immanent data,” where “immanent” means that the form or structure of some phenomenon is coupled to the state of another, so that form of one indicates state of the other, as fingerprints left at the scene of a theft indicate who were the thieves. Floridi believes such immanent data should be understood as “environmental information.”"

"Intrinsic and embodied information. (a) The ambient increases situated, mediated, and tangible kinds of information. (b) In an imaginable limit case, to be avoided, the unmediated, direct, and intrinsic kinds of information have been forgotten."

"In one of the wisest recent essays on what is commonly referred to as “neuroplasticity,” linguist and cognitive scientist Steven Pinker wrote: “Yes, every time we learn a fact or skill, the wiring of the brain changes; it’s not as if the information is stored in the pancreas. But the existence of neural plasticity doesn’t mean the brain is a blob of clay pounded into shape by experience." Instead, neuroplasticity means that habits and tools of engagement matter more than was previously understood. Anyone with a studio practice might understand how context suggests intent. This is why yoga teachers advise setting aside a particular corner of the house for meditation. This is why it is hard to cook in somebody else’s kitchen."

"Thus business and organizational studies emphasize the value of tacit knowledge held by communities of practice. They find that experts don’t so much follow rules as they play situations—the contingent configuration of tools, props, co-present players, and built-in cues and protocols for operation— as a way to bring their environment to attention. For an instance of props, having a prototype on the table shapes what its designers are likely to say"

"Anthony Damasio’s influential 1994 book, Descartes’ Error, argued that the brain and its deliberations are an addition to, not a replacement for, animal biological attention. Melvin Goodale and David Milner’s explanation of “dorsal pathways” had previously argued that tacit environmental perception employs different processes, even different areas of the brain"

"For quite some time, it has been thought that a tool, or even its setting, such as a digital craft studio, is not only for some purpose but also about it. With respect to the capacity of intrinsic structure to influence attention, this means that a set of tools might both put someone in a frame of mind and be essential for building that frame of mind in the first place. Clark referred to this learning effect as “scaffolding.”

"Embodiment makes the difference. Walking provides more embodiment, more opportunity for effortless fascination, and better engagement than looking or sitting. Depending on the balance of fascinating and annoying stimuli, a walk around town may well do some good. That balance is now in play, under the rise of the ambient."

(With respect to BIG's project for Copenhagen, a civic-scale visualisation of data—like the new smokestacks—representing collective waste processing via smoke rings, to be viewed from afar.)"It is an interface you do not operate, and as a part of the scene it is ambient. Such developments in ambient interface may as yet be a sideshow in comparison to how disembodied information media blanket urban space with their screens, but it’s a start."(((But I'd argue you do operate it…. Just as a citizen, collectively, as part of a civic process. It's not like you can pick out the particular "pixels" of your contribution in the overall visualisation, which is comprised of the entire city's patterns of behaviour, but they are in there. You might perceive that you are part of those patterns in this way - not solely as an individual, but as an individual who is part of a city. There is data to suggest—from Helsinki's Nuages Vert project—that this might engender behavioural change. This is the kind of "civic-scale smart meter" idea I pursued on Low2No, Barangaroo, Masdar etc. I think there's something in it. In fact, I think the civic scale feedback here is more interesting than the individual feedback patterns usually delivered, via personal devices. It is also a performance in the city.)))

"Civic identity has to count high among architecture’s roles."(((It should do, absolutely. But how many architects perform in this way, are trained in this way?)))

"The point is that many words refer to, or take scope from, where they are exchanged. A dramatist would understand this as “mise-en-scène”: a script needs a setting; objects (props and backdrops) provide orientation. A neuroscientist would understand this as “scaffolding”: the objects and settings that language refers to become building blocks of action and thought. Rich metaphor depends on analogy in spatial experience."

"Habitual action still makes some demands on executive attention. An increase in tacit knowledge involves an increase of attention but a decrease of perceived effort. Where mediations are necessary, they are best made unobtrusive. Better interface design works with the embodiment of tasks and the configurations of the spaces that support and constrain tacit knowledge."

"(N)ineteenth-century buildings were covered with hand-painted signs. Although you can see relatively little evidence of signage in surviving portrayals of urban scenes before modern, literate times, such as Italian Renaissance paintings, other emblems of trades, perhaps considered inappropriate to include in precious paintings, appear in the engravings of William Hogarth and other artists of the eighteenth century. A major obstacle to compiling a complete environmental history of information is how little of everyday streetscapes survives either in images or in print."(((Indeed, now living in a 14th century city, there are traces of frescos on almost all the older buildings, on the ceilings of all colonnades, under overhangs—everywhere. The buildings, now in dusty faded terracotta and pastels, would once have been a riot of colours, patterns and symbolic information.)))

"The considered life requires a balance between messages and things, between mediated and unmediated experience."

"Does having more ambient information make you notice the world more, or less? Can mediation help you tune in to where you are? Or does it just lower the resolution of life?"

"(T)he Internet shakes the university to its core; presumably, the two are now breeding a new heir."(((The first statement is true. The second? Not without a little help, at least not with purpose and foresight. And no, it's not massive open online courses (MOOCs). MOOCs are the mp3 of education - they radically disrupt the distribution of information, but that's only one slice of the wider pie. mp3s have not radically changed music; largely only distribution. Likewise, MOOCs are the low-hanging fruit of learning: the easiest bit to translate and transmit, and the lowest value component. It is learning at its simplest, its most mundane. This is still useful as it frees up education - say, the university - to spend its time and resources doing something higher value instead - focusing on moments of intense, engaged collaboration, together in physical space. The rest can be displaced: with a hand; it is no great loss. No more than compact discs, and their absurdly-named "jewel boxes". Anyway.)))

"The role of architecture seems central to future inquiries into attention. The cognitive role of architecture is to serve as banks for the rivers of data and communications, to create sites, objects, and physical resource interfaces for those electronic flows to be about. At the same time, architecture provides habitual and specialized contexts by which to make sense of activities. And, where possible, architecture furnishes rich, persistent, attention-restoring detail in which to take occasional refuge from the rivers of data."(((Very good. Again, you won't see architects getting this pointed out at architecture school much currently - with a few honourable exceptions - but there's a good role for architecture in future (alongside many other things of course.))))

Roberto Saviano's speech at Fabrica, 21 May 2013, after a brief introduction by me, and Enrico Bossan. Beware: it features my pitiable attempts in Italiano, which you may wish to skip.

We were honoured to have Roberto Saviano speaking at Fabrica yesterday evening [Update: you can now watch his speech (in Italian) above, or at Vimeo.]

Saviano is one of Italy's leading cultural figures. He's internationally-known for writing the incredible book "Gomorrah", which spawned the equally incredible film of the same name, denouncing the Camorra Mafia's effect on Napoli (and more broadly, Italy and beyond.) "Gomorrah" has been situated within the New Italian Epic movement, as an Unidentified Narrative Object (UNO.) (This is totally fascinating to me, as I'm interested in other, very different, writers such as Peter Robb, Peter Carey, or Jonathan Raban and his "prose narratives", who also float between fiction and non-fiction, objective stance and subjective, personal.)

Saviano was perhaps the most compelling contributor to Bill Emmott and Annalisa Piras's ocumentary about 'good Italy, bad Italy', "Girlfriend In A Coma". Saviano's collection of essays, "Beauty and the Inferno", is a recent favourite.

His new book, "ZeroZeroZero", perhaps explores cocaine in the same way that those books of a few years ago used to pivot around cod or salt or shipping containers, examining how this single phenomenon alters core systems of living across the globe. After "Gomorrah's" success, Roberto is forced to live under police protection, unable to live anything approaching a normal existence. So "ZeroZeroZero's" research, tracking the movement of cocaine across global trade routes and borders, and its influence within global finance in particular, is essentially conducted via the internet. This is immensely interesting to us, as a communications research centre.

However, that necessity of police protection — and many, many thanks to his bodyguards, Benetton security and the local carabinieri, who were nothing but helpful, courteous and totally professional at all points — meant that the arrangements for last night were particularly complex. We could only announce the event with two days' notice. That we got almost 800 people into Fabrica nonetheless is some indication of Saviano's status, and the hunger for this kind of thinking in this region.

We held the event outside in our "agora", the circular outdoor theatre that Tadao Ando designed as the fulcrum of our building. Ever since I got to Fabrica, making that space active has been a priority, and I could not imagine we would get it quite so active within six months or so. It was a delight to see the place full and buzzing.

Although security was the priority, we had to figure lots of other details out too, including back-up parking in nearby farmer's field (thanks!), portable WCs, temporary book-stall, simultaneous translation, locking down the building, and so on. I'd like to personally thank all the Fabrica staff involved in that; there are too many names to list here, but particular thanks to Enrico Bossan who was instrumental in bringing Roberto here, Angela Quintavalle, who coordinated the communications, liaison and overall management, and Stefano Bosco and Luciano Alban, who led on logistics. And thanks also to Feltrinelli, too. But like I say, many others were involved too — it took a supreme team effort. Somehow, sheer force of will sorted out the weather too.

This event was part of our strategy around opening up Fabrica — the space, the organisation, our work, our people — and we were delighted to see people from Treviso, Venice and the Veneto region here in droves. A real mix — young/old, male/female, black/white, North/South— all massively engaged with the event, and then wandering around the building, apparently enchanted not only by Saviano, but the whole experience, the evening, the space, and perhaps even what role Fabrica might play in what Roberto later called "a renaissance of ideas" in Italy. (It's also nice to be able to follow last week's announcement of Sandbox with this very different project, indicating our range as well as a different take on openness.)

It was a privilege to be able to offer Fabrica up to the region last night, particularly in this way, and we will look for other opportunities to do this. It's too good a space, in too good a climate, surrounded by too interesting a proposition not to do this more regularly! Fabrica has never had that many people (perhaps 800) here for an event.

This regional aspect is important, not least because Italy is a loosely unified nation of regions, perhaps more diverse than any other country in Europe and in a fragile coalition right now, but because this particular region of Veneto has aaaah, shall we say, an awkward political relationship with the South. So for Roberto Saviano to speak here was hugely important, as an incredibly eloquent, fluent and compelling intellectual from the South, with genuine presence, honesty and insight. This aspect was pointed out to me by a few of my colleagues, who feel it better than I can. Potente, as they say in Italian. My Italian teacher describes a long tradition of eloquent, powerful orators and writers from the South, but given the current economic scenario, not just in Italy but across Europe, we need these strong characters to become visible, and there are few stronger than Saviano.

Personally, I continue to be amazed at not only at this but also Saviano's sheer humility and generosity. Walking him through Fabrica yesterday, his genuine interest and openness in our work and our people was immediately obvious and disarming to Fabricanti (our researchers) and staff, some of whom were perhaps a little star-struck.

Saviano then stayed another 90 minutes after the long standing ovation that marked the end of his speech, signing books. The security guards waited patiently until the end to get their copies signed. Earlier, I had noticed our cleaning ladies standing listening to Saviano, rapt with attention.

In my introductory speech, I quoted a line from Roberto's preface to "Beauty and the Inferno":

"If anyone hoped that living under extreme circumstances would lead me to hide my words away, there were wrong. I have not hidden them and I have not lost them."

You will have heard a lot about smart cities and the Internet of Things. What you won't have seen is that many genuine products, services and projects in those areas. You will, of course, as there is immense potential after all, but these ideas are clearly something we have a sense of, a hunch about, without the evidence to test it. It's a logical conclusion of a set of cultural and technological drivers, but then people, objects, experiences, buildings and cities are not logical, nor do they conclude.

Given this, BERG and Fabrica have been working together to create a condition where these ideas may be played out, in an open, transparent and legible way, and tested on real projects, in real spaces, with real people. Or as close as we can get to that, anyway.

And that's what we're announcing today. Sandbox is a collaboration between BERG—and specifically the maker kits based on their BERG Cloud platform, as well as their general expertise and creativity in this area—and Fabrica—and specifically, our team of multi-disicplinary researchers and staff, our clients and collaborators, and our building and environment.

At Fabrica, we are creating a campus-wide BERG Cloud network across our extraordinary building, and will be working with BERG's dev boards (with which they recently created Flock, for Twitter) in situ and across client projects, as well doing workshops with BERG to understand their possibilities and collaboratively prototype them. Further, as BERG open up these kits and platforms to other organisations, we'll be getting together to share experiences and collaboratively produce using the platform. This is the beginning, then, of a global network of connected spaces, across schools, studios and research centres (Fabrica is a bit of all three of those) which becomes a community of makers, coders, designers and producers collaborating together to move this area forwards.

A Fabrica interaction designer at work

Jack Schulze came to Fabrica in December, as one of the first in our new series of lectures (more on that later) and he, I and Matt Webb had been talking since about how we could make a project that tests BERG's "dev boards" in the wild, as it were, and how we could take research and development around connected things and spaces beyond Fabrica's interaction team into some of our other studios. I'm interested in transdisciplinary, hybrid projects emerging at Fabrica—what happens when you throw a problem or opportunity at a studio comprising a coder, a graphic designer, an industrial designer, a journalist, a filmmaker, a musician, and external collaborators?—and think we might be uniquely placed to prototype interesting and valuable things as a result of our rich diversity of people, talents and cultures. Our recent COLORS News Machine is an example of this approach to some extent, toquitesomeacclaim, but we want to do more, across all fields.

Fabricat on News Machine

But we needed a platform that simplified that process, that made it relatively easy to connect things with internet, that had focused on the software side (all that messy account and "fleet" management) as well as the hardware side, that was road-tested yet could be developed in collaboration, and that had smart, engaged people behind it that we could work with (you can read my views on why I'm interested in the way BERG works in the Little Printer piece I wrote for Domus.) (BERG's Andy Huntingdon (seen in the Flock video!) is ex-Fabrica, so there's another nice connection too.)

Inside Flock

Little Printer is also a clear proof of concept of BERG Cloud, all the way to successful product. That helps massively, in a world where people tend to build the platform before the things that platforms produce. To do both at the same time, each influenced by the other, is more useful. (By the way, I haven't mentioned here, but we made a Little Printer feed for COLORS magazine several months ago. If you have a Little Printer, you can subscribe to COLORS Yellow Pages here.)

It's not easy to make decisions about which platforms to install in your organisation, particularly in a sector that's moving as quickly as "Internet of Things", but all of this made it an easy choice to get behind BERG Cloud from a maker's point-of-view.

We have a complex, engaging space to work with—for a small campus, we have an immense variety of inside and outside conditions, from 17th century stone and wood to Ando's concrete and glass, from open agora to closed soundbooths, from pools of water to gardens to "savannah", within complex weather patterns.

Fabrica campus

It's an extensive pallette of materials to which we're adding both wireless and data, and with which we can really test what it's like to work with these new materials in real spaces. We also have around 60 people, of all kinds and doing real projects, and so we can begin to explore what it's like to really live, work and play amidst and betwixt connected and disconnected objects and spaces. This will change the way we communicate with each other, and our environment, and it's Fabrica's job to be on top of that.

So on behalf of Fabrica, I can say that we're very proud to be the launch partner for Sandbox. My intention is to turn the Fabrica campus into one of the world's leading centres in this field, for this kind of engaged and meaningful research, development and production which gets beyond the hype around "Internet of Things and smart cities" into uncovering the genuinely interesting possibilities. This includes turning our building and campus into a unique and beautiful place to visit and work with a living, breathing example of these experiences and technologies. We will be running workshops and studios for clients and collaborators in the space, in order to understand the promise of these technologies whilst living and working amongst them. Outside of a handful of research centres and studios, people don't really know what this new world will feel like, and what the possibilities might be—thanks to BERG Cloud and Sandbox, Fabrica will be a place where you can come and explore just that.

If you're interested in that, do get in touch.

And by the way, if you're a young coder, interaction designer or other kind of maker who's interested in joining us at Fabrica, to work on these and other projects, then apply! It's free!

Our first workshop with BERG will take place shortly, wherein Fabrica researchers begin to unbox not just the dev boards but a whole new kind of making.

If you were to make a list of the ten most influential magazines of all time, I'd hazard a guess that Colors magazine might be in there, so it's a particular privilege that we get to produce Colors from Fabrica. I won't go into the past of Colors as that's widely available and discussed elsewhere—suffice to say it’s an incredible and inspirational past—but I wanted to touch on the present of Colors, to coincide with the launch of the new issue Colors #86 "Making The News" (find it here) and our new interactive installation that runs alongside.

When I took the helm at Fabrica, the team had all but completed the previous issue — "Going to Market", and it was a corker of an issue. It perhaps indicated that the current editorial approach of Patrick Waterhouse, Cosimo Bizzarri, Enrico Bossan and team had really hit its stride.

A careful but engrossing linear unfurling of dispatches from markets worldwide—in the widest sense of the word ’market’—it continued the Colors tradition of being “a magazine about the rest of the world” by bringing you stories, angles and images that you just won't see anywhere else. With a distinct editorial tone, stunning photography, illustration and design (for which the team just picked up an Art Directors Club design award), no advertising, and translated into multiple languages, it seemed to me to be a clear articulation of the idea of “slow journalism” (as in slow food, savouring process, craft, provenance, experience, character) which is a term I have probably borrowed from somewhere, though can’t remember who from (tell me below!)

Over the last quarter, Patrick and team created the new issue—just out now!—which focuses on journalism; on the wildy diverse practices involved in "making the news". And they've done an extraordinary job.

It's one of the most thorough, diverse, engaging, thought-provoking and just plain novel statements on the state-of-the-art of journalism I can recall—and this is from someone who follows Nieman, Columbia, Cardiff etc. The stories vary from the demise of the American professional journalist to the emergence of networked alternatives, ranging from the Israeli Defence Force’s twitter feed to a hand-built radio station from a 16 Year-old in Sierra Leone to Dronestagram. It covers Berlusconi’s grip on Italian media as well as Photoshop jobs on Iranian missile tests and the often-staged “realities” of contemporary photojournalism.

The physical experience of the magazine—which we feel still has real value on paper—is also quite something. The issue has a magazine within the magazine, via little pockets of editorial tucked under full spreads, as well as windows cut into pages to indicate how news photographs are framed, and the 'Yellow Pages' newspaper tucked in the back.

My role has been to do no more than supply a few contacts and make a few comments, but this is all the team’s work, so congratulations to them—it’s a landmark Colors issue, I think, and that's saying something.

Since I started we’ve been working on getting it into the right places, both in terms of promotion and distribution. I'm pushing a strategy of taking more control in-house over distribution, subscriptions, back-issues etc. I saw this work at Monocle, when they stopped using Quadrant for subscriptions, after the first year, and handled it in-house, and clearly the strong independent magazine sector (about the only part of the business that is strong) does this instinctively.

So we've rebuilt the online shop using Shopify (particular thanks to Felipe Rocha, David Peñuela and Erica Fusaro for that) and are beginning to wrestle back control of subscriptions and back issues. Physical distribution remains a nightmare—it's just not easy to find Colors, and it should be—and this is one of our biggest headaches, as it is for any magazine. We have a good service via IdN in the Asia-Pacific region, but other regions remain patchy at best. We're working on it. If you run a place that would like to stock Colors, please let us know (email dan dot hill at fabrica dot it.)

And being Fabrica, we're also interested in totally reinventing the business. So we're exploring a modified version of the fine and compelling idea of “social distribution” borrowed from the excellent new title "Works That Work", from the esteemed Peter Bilak and crew. We’ll have Patrick Tanguay of the equally excellent and recent “The Alpine Review” at Fabrica shortly too, to pick his brains on how they handle their business, just as we had the great Marco Ferrari visit the Colors team recently, sharing his experience as creative director of Domus magazine, and particularly the iPad angles developed there.

Speaking of which, we’ll have a new strategy emerging there shortly too, around what Colors does digitally, alongside its paper incarnation. As a hint, we’ve created an interactive installation to work alongside this issue. As the issue is launching this week at the Perugia International Journalism Festival, one of the world’s most important, we wanted to create something that would use Colors #86 as a platform, to explore the same theme but jump of on its own tangent, as well as be something that festival goers could engage with.

Enter the Colors New Machine. Inspired by the cover to Colors #86, and designed by the resident Canadian in our interactive team, Jonathan Chomko, working with Mauro Bedoni, Aaron Siegel and others from Fabrica, it's an interactive installation which playfully deconstructs the notion of the increasingly automated and syndicated 'news machine', via a sort of Heath Robinson-esque 'Chinese Whispers'. You feed the machine via Twitter—tweet a story to @ColorsMachine and see what you get back—and it'll be sitting in a storefront on the main piazza in Perugia during the festival, so do take a look if you're there. Here's that video again: